The Seal Appeal
Created | Updated Nov 9, 2009
I dream of the day that the Edited Guide accepts good writing of any variety.
I don't really go for sitting on the fence on this one. Sure, there are the Researchers who are natural diplomats, and they're conciliatory and patient with it. They're maybe right, that we'll get there eventually. Trouble is, my heart aches because we're not there now.
There's going to be a day when we all finally realise how good the Edited Guide would be if only we break out of arbitrary conventions, and just celebrate writing on its merit.
We'll judge pieces on how effectively they illuminate their subject.
There'll be authentic critics using Guidelines with discretion.
There'll be no more pedants applying rules like bludgeons.
So I plan to keep challenging : chipping away at the pointless bastion with every single thing I write.
We aren't an encyclopaedia. h2g2 utterly fails on three separate grounds to be an encyclopaedia :
- One: it isn't and never could be comprehensive.
- Two : it isn't sufficiently reliable.
- Three : it has a useless index.
On all three counts, it falls well short of numerous other sources of reference.
We shouldn't even aspire to being the universal guidebook, because there's a better one. Wikipedia has won that race.
All we can be is what we always should have been, a repository of considered, provocative and original personal writing. The outcome of the blizzard is a worldwide anthology of individual viewpoints, valid and stimulating in itself.
Once you accept that premise, a requirement of strictly factual accounts becomes a constraint. The Guidelines are turned upside-down. Poetry becomes an effective voice, rather than a proscribed one. Opinion is the point of it all, not some kind of anathema.
There's a small core of low-numbers who resist. I don't understand what drives them. But they know I'll be back, and others like me, and they won't ever escape their fear that the best of h2g2 is built by people more creative than they are.
So write what you want, not what someone tells you to write.
Make it as good as you can make it.
If an idea seems a little difficult or dangerous, just go for it.
If you push yourself, you'll come out on top, because creativity always prevails.
And the Guide will belong to those who have a vision, not to those who cling to a ritual.
We can dream.
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